UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Tag Archives: Ilan Pappe

In the scholarly world we call these movements settler colonialism. We distinguish between them and colonialism, because the settler colonialists are intent on destroying and eliminating the natives. And I think that’s what happened in Palestine.

… It is this story, of Palestinian dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and an ongoing process of what Pappe has termed “incremental genocide”, which for genuine activists, zionism represents. [47:15]

Colleagues in Palestine have called on solidarity organizations and all people of conscience to ratchet-up solidarity work in the light of what Israeli academic, Ilan Pappe, has termed, ‘incremental genocide’ in Gaza. Most recent developments include the mass shootings of March of Return protestors in Gaza. In the past few months hundreds of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza including medical personnel, journalists and children have been killed for demonstrating for their right to return to their land.

A closer deconstruction of this document reveals why this law changes the nature of Israel and, more importantly, why it is ominous as far as the Palestinians are concerned. First, this law denies the fact that within the state of Israel, and indeed within what is called Eretz Israel, there are two national movements. This total denial of the Palestinians’ right to Palestine as a future vision has to be seen in the wider context of the historical circumstances in which Israel was born in 1948. Zionism was a settler colonial movement and Israel is a settler state. This means that Jewish colonisation and the oppression of the Palestinians is on par with the European destruction of the native Americans or of the genocide of the aboriginals by the Australians. The difference is in the historical timing: the Zionist settler colonial project is an unfinished historical episode, as is the Palestinian resistance to it.

This is how the Israeli fiasco unfolded in 2005, which turned into what I have referred to elsewhere as the incremental genocide of Palestine. The Israelis referred to their first operation against Gaza as ‘First Rain’; it was more a rain of fire from the sky than of blessed water from above.

… In hindsight, and especially given the Israeli military commanders’ explanation that the army had long been preparing the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, it is possible that the real purpose of that particular operation was experimental. And if the Israeli generals wanted to know how such operations would be received at home, in the region and in the wider world, it seems that the quick answer was ‘very well’; namely, no governments showed any interest in the scores of dead and hundreds of wounded Palestinians left behind after First Rain subsided.

PAPPE PROVIDES a clear historical overview of the 1948 and 1967 Israeli wars, describing the expulsion and genocide these campaigns were integral to.

Even before 1948, the Zionists aimed “to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible,” Pappe writes… He describes the military regime that controlled the lives of Palestinians in Israel before 1967 and the one that still dominates in the occupied territories today. And within Israel proper, he documents the denial of land and building permits to Palestinians, as well as the discriminatory division of social benefits and employment. When he’s finished, there’s no way anyone could describe Israel as a land offering full civil rights to all its inhabitants. The denial of equal citizenship, says Pappe, is part of the ultimate goal of Zionists to maintain a Jewish state in Palestine, which in a country with so many Palestinians requires “non-democratic means.

Fifty years on, the Zionist left is unfortunately the force the official international community relies on to bring peace. However, most Israelis have stopped playing the first charade of left and right – each with their own excuse or explanation.

Many of them also believe there is no need anymore to play the second charade. Official Israel is no longer worried about how to avoid international rebuke.

Implementing incremental genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza did not move the powers that be, and the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza remain Israel’s best means of fulfilling the vision of a Greater Israel. As long as Israeli leaders face no consequences, they will continue to pursue their vision of a Greater Israel.

For these reasons, we feel it is important to raise awareness about the expanding scholarly understanding of genocide precisely because such discussions can and should ultimately lead to similar discussions in the relevant international tribunals. The idea of establishing a scale of genocidal behavior (not to be confused with incitement, conspiracy, or intent to commit genocide) that would include the experiences of groups such as West Papuans and Palestinians, and in the process also reintegrate concepts like cultural and political genocide (originally termed “politicide”) into the matrix of legal meanings is worthy of study by scholars and advocates. Such an approach would seem to make room for the concepts of incipient (Shaw), incremental (Pappé), or slow motion (Anderson) genocides discussed here to become part of the legal discussion as the term evolves.

The Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) is aggrieved to hear that you are going to perform in Apartheid Israel. We are writing to you from the Besieged Gaza Strip to express what your decision to perform in Israel means to us Palestinians, the victims of the most powerful army in the Middle East.

You might not be aware of the ethnic cleansing that the Israeli regime has been carrying out against us for the past 68 years. We have been violently expelled from our land and have been suffering from the 10 years long brutal and medieval siege imposed on us by air, land and sea. The renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, called it an “incremental genocide“.

Howard Elliott’s editorial on the Green Party of Canada’s BDS resolution exemplifies the mainstream media’s abject failure to inform Canadians about Israel’s appalling human rights violations… So oppressive is Israel’s occupation that world-renowned scholar Noam Chomsky describes it as “much worse than apartheid” in South Africa. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes Israel’s policy regarding Gaza as “incremental genocide.” The UN predicts that Gaza, home to 1.8 million people, may be uninhabitable by 2020.

In a section titled “Invest/Divest,” the MBL platform accuses the US of complicity “in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” refers to Israel as “an apartheid state” and calls for ending US military and financial aid to Israel, arguing that it “diverts much needed funding from domestic education and social programs” in the US.

The backlash from pro-Israel groups and media outlets was swift, with the most scathing coming from the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) in Boston, a member of a national network of communal organizations that lobby for Israel, including by supporting anti-BDS laws in state legislatures around the country… “JCRC cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” the group said in a statement published two days after the MBL platform’s release.

… Such dismissiveness and condescension ignores the growing chorus of scholars, including University of Exeter historian Ilan Pappe and the late Michael Ratner, long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who have argued that Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians since 1948 constitutes a systematic process of “incremental genocide” as defined by international law.